TRENDING

Pulse

By GCN Staff

NGA expands GPS data collection

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which supplies Global Positioning System data to the Defense Department and scientific community, is collecting data from a wider range of GPS reference stations in an effort to improve the accuracy of that data, ArsTechnica reports.

NGA hopes to acquire more orbit information by "collecting the data from a constellation of GPS ground stations operated by private companies and other institutions," ArsTechnica writes.

According to a request for information, NGA intends to augment its real-time GPS data feeds with GPS data from non-DOD entities. There are more than 350 ground stations run by the International Global Navigation Satellite Systems Service as well as GPS stations operated by other government agencies and research organizations, ArsTechnica said.

This network of GPS reference points would improve the speed and accuracy of GPS tracking. Additionally it would allow for lightweight tracking devices that could operate for months on a single charge because the power required for the signal processing calculations would be "pushed into the cloud, where the computational cost is lower and power is plentiful," the article says.